Larry King Quotes

You have to have pace, you have to have high production values, you have to have interesting graphics, and you have to have attractive people. CNN could afford not to be so obedient to those commands, and for a long time, it wasn't.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Some people continue to pretend that anchor people are reporters.

A news-writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for his own profit.

I accept the media for what they are. Most of them are really good people. Some of them are scumbags.

I was at CBS News on a fluke. I replaced somebody who was on vacation. I worked as a copy boy, then became a news writer.

The 800-pound gorillas of TV news are gone. When I was the White House correspondent at NBC, and Tom Brokaw was anchor, the reporters were protected.

I've been doing 'America's Newsroom' and lots of other news shows and writing over the years. That's my thing.

American TV news is much more sophisticated. I think that American TV networks, it looks like, they invest a lot into news.

I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst. I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.

The main job requirement for a network-news anchor is thinking it's the only important job in the world. This is a field where solemn gravitas isn't a drawback; it's the whole point.

I have this vision of maybe going the way of Bill Kurtis and, I think, Tom Brokaw, to a certain extent - the ability to not be tied to the desk anymore, but to do projects that are meaningful to you.

Tom Browkaw said it best. He said NBC could survive without him or the rest of the news division, but not Nancy Fields.

The only way to do news on television is not to be terrified of it.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

I've been a radio and television news person since I was 19 years old. I'm 57 years old now. But the advantage is that I have studied, investigated, and reported over those years on nearly every major story from wars and recessions to grass roots local issues.

Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.

My role, or anyone's role in network news, is to make the person on camera look good. You don't do that, you don't work there.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

I always wanted to be an anchorman, but after college I wound up working behind the scenes at CBS News for 10 years.

When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.